SYSTEMS THEORY
The great advantage is that you can switch between
mathematical, biological, psychological and sociological frames of reference.
As the citizens of less developed countries
are increasingly viewed through the prism of consumerism, control of their
values and purchasing patterns becomes increasingly important to multinational
firms.
At its peak in mid-1990s, Baywatch was watched by more
than 1 billion people a week in nearly 150 countries.
The Baywatch
Theory of Art doesn’t distinguish between a work of art and the kind of object that
it represents. For example, it doesn’t distinguish between a sculpture that
represents a woman with big breasts and a woman with big breasts. John Hyman
The Semiotics Of Bay watch
•Surf and Simulation: Baudrillard and Baywatch Marc Kipness
•‘Baywatch’s hard bodies
triumph with ease over the defenceless antibodies of
other cultures’
•David Hasselhoff : A Semiotic Approach to
One of the World’ s Most Recognized
Images Diane Stevenson
•Hasselhoff ’s
physical signifiers—height , age, tight buns, six pack, suntan, wavy hair,
chest hair, voice—and his character, Mitch Buchanon, lead to a surprising semiotic thesis
•Decoding Baywatch: A
Cross‐Cultural, Ethnographic Study
Tamar Liebes
•Bakhtin Goes to the Beach:
Dialogism and Baywatch Michael Dunne
•Mirrors of Sand: Baywatch
from a Lacanian Perspective Elizabeth Kubek
LINGUISTICS
The first code is linguistic. To encode it we need to be
able to read French.
The next linguistic sign ‘Panzani’
is Italian and encodes not simply the name of the firm but also an additional
signified, that of 'Italianicity'. The linguistic
message is therefore twofold: denotational and connotational. This would not work
in Italy.
The next code involves the image. This provides a series
of discontinuous signs. First (the order is unimportant as these signs are not
linear), the scene represents a return from the market. A signified which
itself implies two values: that of the freshness of the products and that of
the essentially domestic preparation for which they are destined. Its signifier
is the half-open bag which lets the provisions spill out over the table,
'unpacked'. You can read this sign in a variety of ways. The bag is a net.
Fishing is a basic form of catching food, and if ‘in the net’ the food must be
very fresh. A second sign is more or less equally evident; its signifier is the
bringing together of the tomato, the pepper and the tricoloured hues (yellow,
green, red) of the poster; its signified is Italianicity.
The collection of different foods (onions, tomatoes,
mushrooms etc) makes it feel is as though Panzani
provides everything necessary for a carefully balanced dish and it also seems
as though the concentrate in the tin were equivalent to the natural produce
surrounding it.
The composition of the image, evokes the memory of
innumerable paintings, and produces an aesthetic signified: the 'still life';
the knowledge on which this sign depends is therefore also heavily cultural.
The colour is rich and sensual suggesting that this is a
‘quality’ product.
The shape and orientation of the image is ‘portrait’,
suggesting this is person to person communication, therefore you should be
interested.
The
Incredulity of St Thomas by Caravaggio
The basic
physical nature of communication rests in the fact we inhabit a body and that
our senses are dominated by touch
Sheets-Johnson,
M (2009) The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary
Reader London: Imprint
The
Embodied Mind
Communication seen as an extension of the nervous
system. It starts with an awareness of the body. Language is seen as part of
that system existing as as neuronal pathways that are linked within the brain.
The key is a physiological classification of coding and encoding.
•The process of interpretation is central
•Unlike the semiotic tradition, where
interpretation is separate from reality, in the phenomenological tradition we
are interested in what is real for the person.
•Interpretation emerges from a hermeneutic circle in which interpreters constantly go back and
forth between experience and assigning meaning.
•Three schools of the phenomenological
tradition
•
•Classical phenomenology. Key thinker Edward Husserl, who states that
it is highly objective and claims the world can be experienced, through bracketing, the putting aside of bias without the knower
bringing his or her own categories to bear. This is often criticised as
being an impossible task.
•The phenomenology of perception.
Key thinker Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Most contemporary phenomenology rejects the
objectivist view and posits that we can only know things through our personal,
subjective relationship to things.
•Hermeneutic phenomenology, the interpretation of being, extends the
subjective tradition even further by incorporating the communication system
itself as a further interpretive mechanism.
•Hermeneutics, can be thought of as a type of
reading between the lines: Interpretations of interpretations, reflecting the
fact that communication is a matter of dialogue and is multi-channel.
Simple
changes
in
spacing can dramatically change meaning.
“Gestalt perceptual
factors build a visual frame of reference which can provide the designer with a
reliable
psychological basis for the spatial organization of
graphic information.”
Greg Berryman
THE SOCIOCULTERAL TRADITION
•If defining yourself in terms of your
identity with terms such as father, Catholic, student, lesbian, Asian,
Yorkshire etc. you are defining yourself in terms of your identity as part of a
group and this group frames your cultural identity.
•The sociocultural tradition looks at how these cultural
understandings, roles and rules are worked out interactively in communication.
•Context is seen as being crucial to forms and
meanings of communication.
Using
socio-cultural communication theory to understand both how to educate and how
beliefs may have been built up
PERSONAL INVESTIGATION
SEMIOTICS FOR BEGINNERS
THIS IS A USEFUL WEBSITE I HAVE BEEN VISITING TO HELP ME LEARN FOR ABOUT SEMIOTICS. ITS GOOD TO REVISIT CERTAIN AREAS AND RE-CAP.
Seeing semiotics explained in a more visual way helped me get my head around it a lot more. This video is great.
This is also really interesting. This man speaks about semiotics by breaking rules via simple examples then explaining it. Much easier to understand this way.
I came across this infograph from the independent newspaper. It is well designed, easy to understand and gives a little history of semiotics in bite-size chunks.
Visible Signs by David Crow is a really useful book about semiotics which i bought at the start of the year. but didn't read thoroughly enough. Now, i'm going back a re-reading sections of the book and feel that my knowledge is growing about semiotics. VERY GOOD BOOK! I reccomend it!
Examples Of Semiotics
There is an important thing present in advertising and other design uses, that we call semiotics. Actually, it’s present in everything in our lives, so deep that we don’t always pay attention and it happens naturally. So, what is this thing that surrounds us and is so important for design and advertising? The semiotics is the study of signs, and through them, it studies the origins of meaning in different languages of communication.
It goes deep into communication languages, verbal or non-verbal, to even understand why we think about the image of a rose when we hear the word “rose”. Why is this sound or theses letters connected to this object? What is the relation between them that makes the meaning? And more, why do we think about passion when we think about the rose? Though? Just a little, but we’ll talk more about it and show how to use this knowledge for communication and persuasion.
First, know what is a sign and its kinds. A sign is anything that makes meaning. Anything? Sure, if you see/hear something and understand that, it is a sign. They are the mediators to the world. According to Saussure, the signs have two aspects: signifier and signified. The first one is the material that has a meaning and the second one is the meaning. For example, the open sign is the signifier, while the signified is that you can go in.
Symbols – They have no resemblance to the real object, it’s a result of a convention. A symbol can only make meaning if the person already knows that, so, this is a matter of culture and previous knowledge. We all know that a dove represents peace, but there’s no connection between the animal and peace, it’s just a convention. Letters and words are examples of symbols. The graph sign (words) has no direct link to the thing itself, but for each culture, they make meaning. For us, the mourning is represented by the color black, but this color changes for different countries and cultures.
Above, an advert about advertising - Connotations
meat package, distributed largely in supermarkets, as a common commodity. When they put the image of a woman instead of the meat there’s a clear comparison with the woman – a prostitute – and a piece of meat.
the use of simplified pictograms are used all over the world to make it easier to underrstand important information. You'll be able to guess what these mean...
Hiking/Waling - Food/Cafe - Toilets Male Female - Airport - Medical/Hospital - Recycle - Trash/Bin It -Petrol Pump/Gas Station - Telephone
LINGUISTICS
interesting video that shows the basics of linguistics.
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